Tuesday, February 21, 2017

Mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik wonders: “Why do many
Indians need White saviours?” (Scroll.in 26.12.2016) The article is a bit
chaotic and overstresses the element “mythology”, but that may be an
occupational hazard in a writer on the Mahabharata and Purana stories. At any
rate, it seems to have been written without malice, and it deserves an answer.
I will give some observations on the stance of “Whites” in general and then
explain my own position.

English
medium

The first White person to figure in his list of
“saviours” is Thomas Babington Macaulay. In the 1830s he pioneered English
education in India, at least for the elites, whom he then expected to translate
the modern values for the common people. In keeping with the spirit of the
times, his reform was explicitly elitist. But with that limitation, it was nonetheless
not malicious, contrary to the enemy-image he has acquired. He actually
perceived Anglicization as a necessary phase of modernization, in preparation of
India’s independence. Nearly a century before the British loyalist Mahatma
Gandhi converted to the “total independence” ideal, Macaulay already thought in
terms of Indians being independent equals with Britons.

Nonetheless, his policies would lead to the biggest
hurdle for India’s decolonization. The maintenance and expansion of his English
education (and administration) by Jawaharlal Nehru is ultimately responsible
for the major colonial remnant in contemporary India: the dominant position of
English. Whatever Macaulay’s good intentions, which counted for the colonial
period, they have had a deeply antidemocratic effect in the Indian Republic. As
Madhu Kishwar has written: the major determinant of your career chances in
India is not your caste or religion, but whether you are fluent in English.

However, only by way of historical reference can
this situation be called “colonial”. According to the Constitution, English
should have been phased out by 1965; no outside power was involved when the
Indian elite (using the Dravidianist misgivings as pretext) sabotaged this
switch. This elite profited too much from the disenfranchisement of the Indian
commoners by the dominance of English. Without saying it out loud, they thanked
Macaulay for their linguistic privileges. (Ambedkarites in the Christian sphere
of influence also laud Macaulay for bringing, through English, Western
humanitarian and egalitarian values into India.) “Decolonization” implies the
belated phasing out of English, but this will involve the defeat not of some foreign
colonizer but of the indigenous elite.

Something analogous applies to the entire cultural
sphere. Certain colonial injections have been embraced by the indigenous elite,
which then imposes them on a war footing on the general population. Case in
point is “secularism”, originally a phase of late-Christian society,
internalized though heavily distorted by India’s elite, and then imposed on the
entire Indian polity. Another example is the teaching of Western thought models
in each of the Humanities, to the detriment of indigenous models. This counts
in particular for Pattanaik’s own field of mythography, where the ancient
indigenous tradition is being subjected to deconstruction by recent Western
models.

Decolonization

In some respects, talk of “colonial” and of
“decolonization” is embarrassingly obsolete, because the battle lines have
fundamentally changed since 1947. Thus, some Hindu Nationalists fulminate
against “White” interference and accuse “Sepoys” (Indians collaborating with
the colonizers) of “kissing the White a..”; as if there were some “White”
conspiracy against today’s India. When “Whites” (to borrow Pattanaik’s racial
terminology) care about the rest of the world, it is mostly about the Islamic
world as a source of trouble, and about China as a rival. About India, I can
testify that very few outsiders care one way or the other. Indians only flatter
themselves by imagining India to be the target of a hostile conspiracy. And
they are badly living in the past if they imagine that some Westerners are
saying to each other: “For Whiteness’ sake, we have to thwart those damn
Indians.”

To the extent
that race has any importance at all, the world has really changed, and “anti-racism”
has now effectively become the state religion of most Western countries. People
of other races take the same positions vis-à-vis India as Whites used to do, for
these turn out to follow from certain geopolitical constraints, not racial
concerns. In fact, both under a Black Secretary of State (Condoleezza Rice) and
a Black President (Barack Obama), America’s South Asia policy has been as
tilted towards Pakistan and against India as under, say, Richard Nixon. But
admittedly, things become easy when you can divide mankind simply by skin
colour, so this racial approach is attractive to lazy minds.

The situation that Pattanaik puts up for discussion
has little to do with race. That Indian polemicists nonetheless like to speak
in terms of race, as if it were 1940, is not so much morally reprehensible for
being “racist”. Rest assured, for “Whites”, being considered the culprit of
every wrong in the world only evokes a yawn, we’ve heard it so many times. The
problem with it is that it shows mental laziness among Indians, both in the
form of anachronism, as if on a battlefield you can afford the luxury of
anything less than cool realism; and of vicarious self-flattery, as if you are
carrying the mantle of genuine fighters against racial discrimination like Martin
Luther King or Nelson Mandela.

Apparently, it feels great to re-enact the moral
equation of colonial times, with the colonizer rightly in the dock and you on
the moral high ground. It also sounds safely secular, which is why you can
always get the whole audience to applaud when you claim aloud that “the British
imposed the Partition on India”. This is a blatant lie, but one promoted by the
secularist establishment, because it exculpates the Muslim League and its
accomplices Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. The British firmly opposed the
Partition plan, until in March 1947 the newly-appointed last Viceroy, Louis
Mountbatten, gave in to the increasingly violent pressure from the Muslim
League natives.

That is why I don’t like the use of the term
“decolonization” (as opposed to the act of decolonization, wherever needed),
eventhough I myself have prominently used it in the past. It is a term of
adolescent rebellion against the colonizer as father figure, who in reality has
long left the scene. In the land of proud civilization-builders, not just
philosophers like Kapila or Yajñavalkya but also scientists like Lagadha and
Panini and resourceful strategists like Chanakya and Bajirao, this adolescent
behaviour is unbecoming. It is high time for Indians to shed their acquired
inferiority complex as colonial underlings and reconnect with their glorious,
or at any rate independent, past.

“Decolonization” is also a term of cowardice because
it misdirects your combative energies towards a long-dead enemy, thus hiding
your fearful appeasement of more immediate enemies. Whoever speaks of
“decolonization” thereby shows his own use of colonial categories, with your
own destiny still having to be wrested from some foreign authority. In reality,
your destiny is yours, and foreign powers only have as much power in India as
the Indian authorities themselves give them. Indians are responsible, not
colonizers or other foreigners.

Do-gooders

Nonetheless, it does almost look like the situation
of a colonized nation when you consider the enormous cultural power wielded in
India by Western, now mostly American-based, NGOs, think-tanks and institutions
of higher learning. They have rarely been set up in order to serve some
imperial goal, yet they still embody a very colonial psychology. They still
think that India has to be lifted out of its own barbarism. They give
themselves a civilizing mission, constantly nurtured with atrocity literature
to justify the treatment of Indians as backwards in need of tutelage. But
today, this “native barbarism” has been redefined in terms of human rights.
American India-watchers and India-meddlers analyse Hinduism as a litany of
human rights violations, and present themselves as the saviours whom India’s
many oppressed categories have been waiting for.

Pattanaik
makes a good observation when he writes that high-profile India-watching
academics “need to indulge America’s saviour complex if they need a share of
the shrinking funding. The objective of the research needs to alleviate the
misery of some victim and challenge a villain. And so, Doniger will provide
evidence of how Puranic tales reinforce Brahmin hegemony, while Pollock will
begin his essays on Ramayana with reference to Babri Masjid demolition,
reminding readers that his paper has a political, not merely a theoretical,
purpose.” Exactly.

He also is
onto something when he guesses that “European and American academicians have
been on the defensive to ensure they do not ‘other’ the East. So now, there is
a need to universalise the ‘othering’ process – and show that it happens even
in the East, and is not just a Western disease. And so their writings are at
pains to constantly point how privileged Hindus have been ‘othering’ the
Dalits, Muslims and women, using Sanskrit, Ramayana, Mimamsa, Dharmashastras,
and Manusmriti.”

That doesn’t
explain everything, but it must be welcomed as a true observation on the
“social justice warrior” nature of current Orientalist scholarship. It is
scholarly in the sense of coming with lots of footnotes, but not in the sense
of being impartisan and objective. Here you should realize its continuity with
the colonialist endeavour at its starkest. When Hernán Cortéz conquered Mexico,
he used social and ethnic grievances to mobilize the local “lower castes” as
cat’s paw against the ruling Aztecs. In both cases, the goal is to dispossess
the dominant group among the “savages” and thus bludgeon it into opening up to
“civilizing” influences, and the means to achieve this is often an alliance
with the groups with grievances against it.

This is where Wendy Doniger and Sheldon Pollock come
into the picture. They are representative of the enormous ideological clout
Westerners still wield in India. The
colonial-age Orientalists only conditioned the minds of a small
intellectual upper class; today, the Western view of India and Hinduism,
through mass education and the media, influences everyone and co-determines
policy-making. Because Indians have invited the Donigers and Pollocks in.

From her writings, it appears that Wendy Doniger
does not consciously position herself as anti-Hindu. To be sure, she is
partisan, e.g. Pattanaik notices that in the dedication to her “banned” book, “Doniger refers to a ‘good fight’ against Hindutva”.
But she thinks those who have been identified with the struggle for the Hindu
cause have misunderstood their own religion, while she is in fact restoring the
“real” Hinduism. She genuinely believes that her Freudian interpretive model of Indian
mythology somehow reveals true underlying meanings, the hidden logic of
Hinduism.

In fact, it is to a large extent the same approach
that Pattanaik has also used to build a career of explaining Hindu stories in a
manner acceptable to secularists and poorly rooted anglicized Hindus. In that
sense, it is to be welcomed that he is now shifting towards a stance critical
of Doniger, apparently under the influence of Rajiv Malhotra’s criticism of his
own Donigeresque approach to Indian stories.

Wendy Doniger’s conception of Hinduism deserves a
more thorough treatment, much of which has already been pioneered by Rajiv Malhotra.
But one general observation, which counts for the whole current of
psycho-analytical “deconstruction” of Hinduism, is that the clumsy Freudian
concepts she uses are simply not sufficient to understand Hindu explorations of
consciousness and human nature. I once heard an Indian psychologist who had
guzzled down big doses of this psycho-analytical framework, pontificate that a
Guru is followed because he is a “father figure”. You could see him savour this
expression, as if he considered what he had said as very profound. Well, there
are many types of father figure, but only few have the specific qualities
needed to be a Guru; and psycho-analysis has never been able to turn anyone
into a Guru in the Hindu sense. The smaller cannot contain the greater.

There is something comical about the psychologist’s
attempt to fit the hoary Hindu ideas about the psyche into the modern attempts by
his own new-fangled discipline, still groping in the dark. But because
Doniger’s flippant approach serves the purpose of belittling and ridiculing
Hinduism well, it is welcomed and highlighted by the Indian elite with its
many-pronged attack on Hinduism. And she is not even a psychologist: elsewhere,
her “alternative” (actually quite conformistic, only a bit more titillating)
deconstruction of a religion would have been criticized as not based on any
competence.

Politicized
philology

Sheldon Pollock, a very good Sanskritist at least in
a purely linguistic sense, is more explicitly involved with the anti-Hindu
discourse promoted in India by the missionaries and the Ambedkarites, and their
first line of attack, the “secularists”. He has pioneered some valid insights
into the Sanskrit “cosmopolis”, which did not oppress vernacular languages from
Gandhari to Javanese but fruitfully coexisted with them to their mutual
benefit. But at the same time, he has helped greatly in belittling and
politicizing the Ramayana and in promoting the “Hinduism bad, Buddhism good”
thesis.

This is not very original, in fact it is only a
sophisticated formulation of widely-held views. Thus, Pattanaik attributes the
same viewpoint to another big name we just met: “Doniger’s essays on the Puranas make you see Hinduism as a violent
authoritarian force challenged by non-violent egalitarian Buddhism.” But in this discourse of
hate, which instrumentalizes Buddhism as a bludgeon to beat Hinduism with,
Pollock has gone farther than all others. In 1993 he published a paper arguing
that Hinduism (particularly the Mimansa school, Brahminical par excellence)
sits at the centre of Nazi doctrine. Yes, it is long ago, and partly
explainable from the war psychology emanating from the Ayodhya controversy, in
which he explicitly sided with the negationist school denying Islam’s
well-documented destructive role in Hindu history. But he has never retracted
this position and has remained a leading voice in anti-Hindu and anti-Brahmin
discourse.

In this case, as in some other matters (such as the
exact place of Christianity in European civilization, often exaggerated in
India, e.g. Doniger and Pollock are not
motivated by Christian concerns, a secularist position which Pattanaik here
acknowledges to be “the hallmark of objectivity
in educational circles”), my own role has been to help Indians in better
understanding European history wherever it is relevant to Indian debates. The
case Pollock has built, is untenable for anyone familiar with the concerned
part of European history. What few Indomanic racists have existed in Germany
during the century before 1945, were not exactly poles apart from Pollock and
the secularists: on the contrary, they shared the latter’s own anti-Brahminism
and pro-Buddhism. They considered Brahmins as agents of the “dark indigenous”
people mired in superstition and puerile ritualism, who contaminated the pure
“Aryan invader” culture, while they held the Buddha to have been a real Aryan
trying to restore the genuine and superior Aryan traditions. Hitler was not
only an anti-Semite but in passing also a votary of India’s equivalent,
anti-Brahminism. That is why Pollock fails to quote from the
“National-Socialist Indologists” a single line in praise of Jaimini or Kumarila
Bhatta or any other Mimansaka, but has to quote the Buddha’s name several
times.

This little excursus into the nadir of Sheldon
Pollock’s scholarship should, however, not obscure the fact that with his
erroneous anti-Brahmin spin on the history of German Indology, he is serving an
Indian rather than a Western cause. Today, anti-Brahminism comes in as a
helpful tool for US-based missionaries to pit Hindus against one another along
lines of caste and ethnicity (“Dravidians” and “Adivasis” against “Aryan
invaders”), and in the 19th century, it has indeed been launched by
missionaries; but it has now mainly become an Indian ideology animating much of
Indian culture (Bollywood) and politics. More than some CIA conspiracy, it is
this Indian current that Western scholars seek to align with.

Skin
colour

“But who does
Hindutva turn to for establishing the greatness of Hinduism, and Sanskrit, and
Vedas? A European, Koenraad Elst. And an American, David Frawley. So much for ‘decolonising’
the Hindu/Indian mind. So much for swadeshi. Does this reveal our deference to
White scholarship? Does this reveal Indians are beyond racism? One wonders if
African American Indologists or Chinese American Indologists would ever evoke
similar passions.”

The colour
obsession, while not entirely absent among the Indian public, does not go very
far in explaining our role in Indian politico-cultural discourse. It so happens
that “Oriental Philology and History” (one of my diplomas), the proper name of
“Orientalism”, was developed in Europe, and some of those roots are still in
force, all while it now largely conditions the dominant Indian discourse about
India itself. The “White” presence in this line of scholarship was almost a
100% till recently, as the upcoming non-White presence in Western universities
(as Indians know all too well) was mostly in Engineering and Medicine,
shortcuts to status and wealth, not in the Humanities and certainly not in its
more esoteric departments. It is only recently that the children of Asian
immigrants have started entering the “Orientalist” sections. But I am sure that
the day a Chinese-American, not to mention an Indian-American, starts putting
out theses as provocative as Doniger’s or Pollock’s, and from equally
prestigious positions, he will evoke similar passions among the affected Hindu
public.

The use of
Westerners, the reason why they can serve as argument of authority in India, is
firstly that in controversies, they count as outsiders, hence more objective;
and secondly, that modern culture does indeed count as intrinsically more
scientific. The first argument is very weak: those who get close enough to
Indian culture to have anything to say about it, have usually befriended one of
the warring camps inside India, and hence have become just as partisan as their
Indian sources. Thus, practically all the Western press correspondents in Delhi
are safely in the pocket of the secularists and cherish a vicarious hatred of
assertive Hinduism. This yields what I have called a “circular argument of
authority”: Indian secularists feed their Western contacts their own view of
the Indian religio-political landscape, and when their Western dupes then go
public with these same views, the secularists hold them up as independent
confirmation of their views by the scientific West.

Strategy

Pattanaik is oh so even-handed: “If we attribute
strategy to the works of Doniger and Pollock, the same needs to be done to the
works of Elst and Frawley.” I don’t know about David’s, but in the case of my
own work, I am surprised to learn of its “strategic” dimension. I don’t know of
any policy that was inspired by my work.

It seems that we “are catering to a vast latent
need of privileged Hindus to feel good about themselves”. I leave it to David
to explain his motive (which I think is simply a love of Hindu Dharma, but I
admit Pattanaik may consider this naïve), but mine is as follows.

Part of it is
again given by Pattanaik himself: “After having been at the receiving end of
Orientalist and Marxist criticism since the 19th century, privileged Hindus have
not developed requisite skills in the field of humanities to launch a
worthwhile defence.”

That much is
certainly true: both in India and in the diaspora, talented Indian youngsters
have rushed to the Medical and Engineering departments, leaving the Humanities for
their not-so-bright brothers and sisters. Hindu activist organizations have
never invested in scholarship, and their very few recent attempts to gain a
toehold in this little-understood world have been clumsy and unsuccessful. Add
to this that in these departments, the Left has built a power position and
enforces its vetoes against anyone showing any sign of loyalty to the Hindu
cause. So, to say that “Hindus have not developed requisite skills in the field
of humanities” is not far off the mark. With my limited means, I used to assume
I had something to contribute there, viz. a more accurate picture of Indian
history compared to the facile or plainly mischievous assumptions that the Left
has tried to instil in the next generations.

Then there is
the reason Sir Edmund Hillary gave for climbing the Everest: “Because it was
there.” When I noticed the big power-wielders in the Indian landscape with
their rope tricks fooling people on the Ayodhya temple or the Aryan debate, the
adventurous White man in me was awakened to go “hunting tigers out in Indiah”.
That is, at least, if you try to think up a subsconscious personal reason. My
conscious reason was that so much bluff as was spread by the Indian
intellectual establishment simply had to be answered and defeated.

Conversion

“Outsourcing
the job to White Men is an easy alternative. Particularly those who manage to
establish credibility. Frawley does that brilliantly by declaring himself a
Hindu, with an evocative title of Pandit Vamadeva Shastri, which makes him a
“Brahmin” in Hindu eyes, justified on grounds of his vast knowledge of the
Vedic scriptures, and his long practice of Ayurveda and Jyotisha. His wife is
Indian, and has the title of Yogini. Elst, by contrast, insists that he is not
a Hindu, for he is well aware that no one can be ‘converted’ to Hinduism, that
it is linked to birth, and that Hinduism is deeply linked to geography.”

Secularists
are fond of saying (and of quoting Westerners to the effect) that “there is no
conversion to Hinduism”: to them it means that Hindus are condemned to keeping
mum when the missionaries convert to Christianity. By contrast, I do think
conversion to Hinduism is possible. Firstly, communities as a whole have done
it throughout history; it is between communities that conversion is rare. (If
you are a Jat or a Rajput and you convert to Islam, you will still get
identified with your caste for generations. Indian Muslims have been tutored to
hide this, to uphold the anti-Hindu fiction of an “egalitarian Islam”, but
Pakistanis candidly tell you: “I am a Rajput Muslim.”) Secondly, in borderline
situations such as a mixed marriage, someone can join a particular Hindu
community, on condition that its legitimate members accept you as one of
theirs.

And then
there are the present circumstances, where Hindus are forced to compete with
predators and hence modestly organize Ghar Wâpasi (“return home”), the
reconversion of people once estranged from Hinduism. I fully support that policy.
It mostly works among villagers, with whom bookish me has little rapport; but
if my writing about Islamic scripture can help a Muslim to free himself from
his religious conditioning so that he wants to “return home”, I will be most
happy.

In spite of
all that, I myself have never converted to Hinduism, though I have received
initiations from several acknowledged Gurus. I do not sport a Sanskrit name.
But that is not at all meant as a tacit criticism of the course David Frawley
has chosen.

“Frawley
overcomes this bottleneck easily by insisting Vedic civilisation is universal
and open to all humanity, and by defining what it means to be a true Brahmin. It
is significant, however, that no white convert to Hinduism ever identifies
themselves as Vaishyas or Shudras. It is either Brahmin or Kshatriya, that is
intellectual and combative – and always superior. So much for ‘division of
labour’ thesis of varna.”

The Brahmin
name “Shastri” was given to David, it is not he who claimed Brahminhood. As for
myself, by traditional definitions of varna, I would of course be a Shudra, and
there is nothing wrong with that. A Swiss friend of mine (and of “Vedic
socialist” Swami Agnivesh), who lived in an ashram in Rishikesh for years,
calls himself Shudrânanda: Shudra and happy to be one! Among great Hindu
figures I particularly like, is Sant Ravidas, who was a cobbler on the
outskirts of Varanasi. Well, the outskirts of Hinduism, that is where you might
situate me.

Polemics

I feel
flattered by Pattanaik’s accurate assessment of the history debates I have
participated in: “Elst has done a lot of research on Ayodhya and endeavours to
provide evidence to prove the Babri Masjid was indeed built on a site that once
housed a Hindu temple. He has strongly challenged views of scholars like
Richard Eaton who seek to secularise the iconoclasm of Muslim rulers. The
standard trope in modern historical studies seems to be that Hindu temples were
destroyed not only by Muslim rulers but also by Hindu rulers as part of
establishing their authority. It disregards all Hindu memory and Islamic
writing that shows motivation of Muslim rulers at its core was religious,
designed to replace the Hindu faith with Islam. This is aligned with Western academic
anxiety at being seen as Islamophobic – no points lost if one is Hinduphobic.
Elst provides the fodder to challenge this view.”

But here I
break ranks with many history-rewriters: “Both Elst and Frawley provide strong
arguments to support the ‘Out of India’ theory that seeks to establish India as
the true homeland of the Aryan race or Sanskrit language, claiming it gave
civilisation to the world.”

“Despite
their deep knowledge of Hinduism, neither Elst nor Frawley, neither Doniger nor
Pollock, believe in letting go and moving on, which is the hallmark of Hindu
thought, often deemed as a feminine trait. Instead, Elst and Frawley keep
drawing attention to injustice done by colonisers, goading Indians to rise up
and fight, a violent tendency that is the hallmark of Western thought, often
deemed as a masculine trait. Likewise, Doniger and Pollock keep reminding their
readers that Hinduism’s seductive ‘spirituality’ must at no point distract one
from its communal and casteist truths.”

Wow, psycho-analyzing people from a distance, that
must be tough. Look, I don’t understand all this jargon dividing civilizations
into “feminine” and stuff. I merely see a debate (about the invasion theory)
that has not been satisfactorily concluded yet, so I keep working. That is not
an idiosyncratic refusal to let go. After the Ayodhya debate was concluded and
the pre-existence of a temple at the site proven and officially accepted, I
have left that debate behind me. I let go of it.

By contrast, the injustice done by the Muslim
colonisers remains a fact with consequences in the present day, and continuous
with some presently existing injustices (violent oppression of Hindus in
Muslim-majority states, anti-Hindu discriminations in the Constitution). Letting
go of those concerns would be too early. That is just a matter-of-fact view.
Myth cannot really throw new light upon it.

Likewise, I assume that Wendy Doniger and Sheldon
Pollock take the causes they fight for seriously. In that case, they must
realize that those causes are large and not exactly ephemeral: they will still
be with us on our dying day. So, people are free to change course in life, but
abandoning a project you have worked for before seeing it through is not
particularly virtuous. I don’t think sons of the Indian soil like a BR Ambedkar
nor a SR Goel abandoned the causes they worked for halfway. It is not always
time to “let go”.

Parting shots

So far, so good. But in cauda venenum, the venom is in the tail. I strongly object to
Pattanaik’s parting shots.

“So both parties
keep the Hindu wound festering. Both also offer the balm of ‘justice’, a
Western approach that is politically volatile for India, and commercially
lucrative for them.”

The people
who created doubts about the temple in Ayodhya, and inflicted the whole
controversy on India (and on Hindu communities in Bangladesh and the UK), did
unnecessarily revive an old wound and then kept it festering. Those who sought
for the exact historical scenario and its doctrinal background did just the
opposite. And as for the bystanders who ignore the factual results that the
latter have achieved, the too seem to want the controversy to “fester”.

As for
“lucrative”, for those familiar with the vetoes and exclusions inflicted upon dissenters
by the Humanities establishment in the West and the secularist establishment in
India, such a thought is beneath contempt. If “lucre” had been my motive, I
would of course have joined the opposite camp.

And here he
is really mistaken: “Neither privileges the Indian idea of diversity, that
rejects homogeneity, and allows for multiple paradoxical even hierarchical
structures to co-exist.” At least when speaking for myself, I can confidently
state that on the contrary, my criticism has always been directed precisely
against the religions and ideologies that are out to suppress diversity.

The
mythographer speaks: “Doniger and Pollock follow the Greek mythic pattern that
establishes them as heroes who are in the ‘good fight’ against ‘fascist’
monsters. Elst and Frawley follow the Abrahamic mythic pattern that establishes
them as ‘prophets’ leading the enslaved – colonised – Indians back to the
‘Vedic Promised Land’.”

I don’t know
how Greek a “good fight” is, but that is indeed how they see their work; and so
do we. As for prophets, I don’t really believe in divine spokesmen, so let that
sobriquet pass. Perhaps David, who is more of a visionary, could be described
in those terms, though he himself, as far as I know, never did. Me, I only see
specific errors being made, and I am simply the much-needed schoolteacher
wielding his red pencil. If that can lead anyone to his Promised Land, fine,
but I don’t even look that far, I just want those errors out of the way.
Perhaps Bhangi (sweeper) would be a good caste for me.

But then: “Being
placed on a high pedestal is central to both strategies. Criticism also evokes
a similar reaction in both sides – they quickly declare themselves as
misunderstood heroes and martyrs, and stir up their legion of followers.
Doniger and Pollock have inspired an army of activist-academicians who sign
petitions to keep ‘dangerous’ Indian leaders and intellectuals out of American
universities and even American soil”: Subramanian Swamy, Narendra Modi, and in
similar controversies Rajiv Malhotra, the Dharma Civilization Foundation and
others. Indeed, the Indological community’s touching (occasional) concern for
freedom of speech is not erga omnes.
And at that point, any similarity with Frawley and myself ends.

“No dissent
is tolerated. If you agree with either side, you become rational scientists for
them. If you disagree with them, you become fascists – or racists.” Both
Frawley and myself have written thousands of pages. I offer one symbolic rupee
for whoever can find any statement to that brandishing effect. On the other
hand, I can point to a number of pages in my own work where I go out of my way
to defend the freedom of speech of those conspicuously not in agreement with
me, esp. Wendy Doniger. No special merit, for if you yourself have been the
target of enough exclusions, it comes easily.

It seems we
are dealing with an attitude that seeks to come out on top during a argument by
picking up the quarrel in the middle and pretending that both sides are equal.
A very profitable posture, for it also allows for laziness since you don’t even
have to study the contents of what the two sides are saying or doing.

Now that our mythographer has gone off track, he
extemporizes all at once about “White Knights” with a “Hindutva obsession”,
opposing “multiple truths” and waging a “Crusade against Muslims”, out to “dehumanise”
the opposition. Here I confess, I simply can’t keep up with his cannonade. I
think he is referring to himself when he speaks of “rejecting the model of
conversation”.

Wrong!

Yet, I have
hardly any quarrel with Pattanaik’s conclusion: “If we have to truly be
decolonised, and truly swadeshi, be it the MK Gandhi or the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh variety, we have to overcome our inferiority complexes, and
without succumbing to chauvinism, realise that we Indians, with all our
shortcomings, do not really need Europeans and Americans to tell us what
Hinduism, Sanskrit or Vedas were, are, or should be.”

Well, if you
put the issue in those terms, I am all for overcoming inferiority feelings and
dependence on others. That is why Indians don’t need Doniger’s eroticized or
Pollock’s politicized reading of the Ramayana, and why the interiorization of
their approach in the late AK Ramanujan’s or in Pattanaik’s own work was a bad
idea. Only, I don’t think that that is because these august scholars are
“White”, or “Western”, or even “Indologists”, but merely because they are
wrong.

It is no big deal
to be wrong once in a while. Fortunately there are others, conversation
partners with a verbal red pencil, who are kind enough to correct you. Vishal
Agarwal has published a whole book of corrections to the many errors in Wendy
Doniger’s not-so-banned “banned book”. I have participated in a whole
conference to set Sheldon Pollock’s loaded views of Sanskrit straight. It will
not save the world, or even that small part of it that is India, nor that small
minority that is still Hindu. But still it is a good clean feeling not to have
to live amid untruths, whether lies (oh, how I loathe that term) or, more
often, mistakes. Myths are another matter.

There are a lot of things wrong with
many Indians’ unquestioning trust in and use of the thesis put forward by
Edward Said in his unjustly famous book Orientalism (1978). This work is
full of factual errors, leaves unconsidered the German-language mainstay of orientalism
(to which its main proposition linking Orientalism with colonialism happens not
to apply), and essentially is a conspiracy theory, turning all scholars
concerned into colonial agents. But with regard to Indians specifically, it
uses “Orientalism” in a sense different from the original application relating to
India, which in turn is distinct from its academic use as the name for a
philological discipline. “Orientalist” originally refers to those British
administrators of India who, around 1800, opined that the native languages were
more suited as mediums of education and modernisation than English. Whereas “Orientalism”
has become a dirty word among Hindu nationalists as much as among ‘postcolonial’
Marxists, the historical Orientalists actually pursued nativist education
policies still advocated by the same Hindu nationalists.

Now a book has appeared which
presents the man who put the Orientalists out of business by pushing through an
Anglicist education policy: Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859).
Finally, we have an up to date biography of this person extremely influential
in Indian history. As Zareer Masani says on the cover of his book Macaulay.
Pioneer of India’s Modernization: “If you’re an Indian reading this book in
English, it’s probably because of Thomas Macaulay”. His last biography was one
by his nephew George Otto Trevelyan, still in the nineteenth century.

The present
book is a pleasant enough read, giving all the relevant data. It
is marred by only one factor, which may even garner the author sympathy among some
of his readers, namely his all too conspicuous sympathy for his subject, not to
say his unconcealed admiration.

By birth and upbringing, Macaulay
was part of a British circle of elite people who were both liberal and
Christian. The best known example of this movement was William Wilberforce (1759–1833), who
successfully campaigned both for the abolition of slavery and for allowing
missionary activity in India. We see Macaulay going to India not to fulfil a
historical mission, but as the only way seemingly open to him to boost his
finances. He worked as an assistant to Governor-General William Bentinck, most
famous for prohibiting the self-immolation of widows on their husbands’ funeral
pyres (satī). It was formally in a
written advice to him that he formulated his famous Minute on Education
in 1835. Apart from determining education policy for centuries to come (we
still have an education system sensibly called Macaulayan) , he also made his
mark in other areas: e.g. he drafted the Indian penal code. Then he returned to
stay in England for twenty more years as a scholar and a famous poet, to die at
age 59.

It will not endear the man to Indian
nationalists that he used his spare time in Calcutta to pursue his interest in
the Graeco-Roman classics while spurning the native ones. His contempt for
Sanskrit writings is well-known and comes through in his Minute, where
he equates the whole of Sankrit literature in terms of knowledge content with a
single shelf of a popular library in Britain. Or, according to the approving
author: “Macaulay was notoriously dismissive, if not downright hostile and
contemptuous, about native Indian, and particularly Hindu, customs and
religious superstitions” (p. xiii).

Hindu nationalists tend to use his
name when they mean the Anglicised elite. However, he did not spin a conspiracy
that made the influence of the British long outlast their presence in India, as
nationalist narrative implies. Instead, Indians themselves have opted for his
and against nativist policies regarding language and education. Maybe they have
chosen to pursue a wrong course (or maybe not, as this book affirms), but it is
at any rate their own doing, not that of a Western conspiracy.

Was Macaulay’s education policy good
for the former untouchables, here called “Dalits” (the choice of words in this
case being very sensitive)? As Dharampal
has shown in his book The Beautiful Tree. Indigenous Indian Education in the
Eighteenth Century (New Delhi: Biblia Impex 1983), basing himself
on contemporaneous British surveys carried out in preparation of the
implementation of Macaulay’s policies, Indian schools were by no means backward,
and the school system was definitely more democratic than the contemporaneous one
in England. It did not serve many untouchables, but they were represented,
contradicting the usual assumption that low-castes were forbidden from learning
to read and write. Moreover, positing a causal relation between the
introduction of the English medium and the emancipation of the low-castes is
factually incorrect. China pursued a radical policy of equalisation and
achieved near-general literacy without using one word of English. Many Chinese
engineers of whatever social background work at high-tech jobs without knowing
English.

Macaulay also did not have the egalitarian
reforms in mind which his present-day Dalit fans ascribe to him. Britain at
that time had steep class differences, which helps explain why, as
administrators in India, the British could so easily accommodate the caste
system. As we learn in this book, Macaulay was not in favour of universal
franchise, preferring to keep it restricted to people owning property or
diplomas. The Indian leftists and subalterns the very circles that celebrate his memory opposed the latest Gulf War in which a
superpower bludgeoned a backward country in the name of human rights (and probably
in the service of private capital). Exactly the same conditions prevailed in
the First Opium War, which Macaulay passionately and prominently
supported.In this case, the author is
more even-handed, observing that today, “Macaulay’s ideas about an imperial
mission to inform and educate still underpin the way the West exports its
values to the rest of the world, especially through ‘soft’ power and the subtle
transfer of cultural and economic norms” (p. xv).

Did
Macaulay provide the glue that still holds independent India together, as his
fans, including the author, believe? The Constituent Assembly envisaged two
alternatives to English as the official language: Hindi, taken to be more or
less spoken as a mother tongue by some 40% of the population, which was chosen
and badly failed (partly but not wholly by sabotage from the English-speaking
elite); and Sanskrit, which had a history as an official language and was
highly respected both in India and abroad. Sanskrit was little spoken (as was
English), but learning it as a common second language would have proved easier
than making Hebrew the first language for Jews migrating to Israel, also
because of the many vocabulary links between Sanskrit and the vernaculars. If
Sanskrit was a difficult language, it was difficult for everyone, and it did
not seriously favour one region over another, the way Hindi did.Even Bhimrao Ambedkar, Law Minister and
venerated ideological light of most low-caste Macaulay fans, strongly supported
Sanskrit. India might have been united under its own classical language.
However, after a 50–50 vote,
Assembly President Rajendra Prasad cast the fateful deciding vote in favour of
Hindi, thus aborting the possibly successful Sanskrit experiment and indirectly
making English the only viable alternative. Macaulay might have been history by
now, but he is back with a vengeance. And if Masani has his way, Macaulay is
here to stay.

About Me

Koenraad Elst (°Leuven 1959) distinguished himself early on as eager to learn and to dissent. After a few hippie years he studied at the KU Leuven, obtaining MA degrees in Sinology, Indology and Philosophy. After a research stay at Benares Hindu University he did original fieldwork for a doctorate on Hindu nationalism, which he obtained magna cum laude in 1998.
As an independent researcher he earned laurels and ostracism with his findings on hot items like Islam, multiculturalism and the secular state, the roots of Indo-European, the Ayodhya temple/mosque dispute and Mahatma Gandhi's legacy. He also published on the interface of religion and politics, correlative cosmologies, the dark side of Buddhism, the reinvention of Hinduism, technical points of Indian and Chinese philosophies, various language policy issues, Maoism, the renewed relevance of Confucius in conservatism, the increasing Asian stamp on integrating world civilization, direct democracy, the defence of threatened freedoms, and the Belgian question. Regarding religion, he combines human sympathy with substantive skepticism.